Thirst {Part One}.

Coffee is good. I love it.

And I love coffee shops. And not just because the word “shop” got added. No, I am not one of those girls. While I don’t make many promises for my writing, I will promise you that this little blog here will never become the Confessions of a Shopaholic.

Moving on.

So coffee. You will find that most coffee drinkers, I believe, start out by drinking the sweet stuff. You know: Mocha, cappuccino (like the kind from those machines in the gas station. Not real cappuccino, mind you. Good heavens, no. That stuff is not sweet in the least. I learned this lesson when I was seven in a very fancy hotel.), macchiato, blah blah blah. You get the picture. It’s all the coffee with all of the cream and sugar of various species. Well I was one of those people. For years and years that was my thing.

But then I started noticing a change in me. All of the sudden my order went from my standby of a turtle mocha (a mocha {espresso, frothed milk, and chocolate} with a shot of caramel), to just a mocha. And then after a while of that it changed again….to a latte {espresso and steamed milk}. While you may think this is crazy talk, let me blow your mind a little more: my drink order now is dark (or medium, I suppose) roast COFFEE, just coffee, with “room for cream.”
Yeah, I know. Talk about “crazy talk” is right!
But one thing I noticed, no matter what level of coffee with sugar I was consuming, was that after a while, after a couple cups, I was done. I couldn’t drink any more.  I wasn’t thirsty anymore. My body couldn’t take any more beverage.

This week my devotions have found me in Nehemia. Good book. It comes right after Ezra, which is also a good book. Both of them are about the same event in history: the exiles returning to Jerusalem and rebuilding its city wall. When the wall got completed they did what every good Jewish community does---they celebrated!! It so happened to be the time of the year when they celebrated the Feast of the Tabernacles (or Booths), which is a festival that commemorates when the Israelites lived in booths in the wilderness.

Curious about said feast, I followed a couple of cross references my Bible gave me and came to John 7:37-38.

“On the last and greatest day of the Feast, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, ‘If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.”

One thing to note is that this is an 8 day feast. Can you imagine? 8 days of extravagant eating and drinking. Thanksgiving every day for a week. Yikes. Wow.

With that in mind then, I was taken aback at what appears, at face value, to be an obnoxious question or statement from Jesus… “If anyone is thirsty….”
ARE YOU KIDDING ME?
Thirsty?
They hadn’t been thirsty in seven and a half days. Talk about too much coffee….

This scene I imagine reminds me of when I was a wedding planner. Sure, there were some really hot outdoor weddings, I live in the Midwest, but none warranted a lot of what I saw. I remember very vividly seeing all of these groomsmen get into the reception hall after the outdoor ceremony, shed their suit coats the minute they could, and literally, rush the bar.

One beer.
Two beer.
Three beer.
Four.

And I would watch these people and all I could think was, “You just downed 8 beers in an hour. Give me a break, boys. You’re not thirsty anymore.”

Say what you want about alcohol, all I will say about this certain situation is this: it could have been soda, it could have wine, it could have been water---after 8 of anything you aren’t thirsty anymore. And I don’t care how hot it is.

I think this is most likely very similar to the Feast that Jesus was at. Whether it was beer, wine, water, or whatever was their soda equivalent in those days, these people weren’t thirsty anymore. This was their eighth day of drinking.

But he still made that statement. He knew what I just told you, he knew their bodies were water-logged, yet that didn’t stop him from saying the most bizarre thing.

“If anyone is thirsty…”

Think about it. Jesus said this to a crowd who has had all of their physical needs met.

They are not people who starve—they gorge. They don’t drink to quench—they’ve probably drank to alter.
I live in the United States of America in the 21^st century. Experts say that people of my generation have known more opulence and luxury than even ancient and historical kings who once ruled the world. Let’s be honest, I have never known hunger. Like these Feast-goers, I have never had a time when I was thirsty and had nothing to quench it with.

 So what could this possibly mean then? This phrase is not just here, but literally all over the Bible. “All who are thirsty…come.” If I can have every physical need met, food, water, shelter, clothing, and be living in a time of continual feasting and opulence, and yet still be referred to by the Bible as one of the “thirsty,” then it has to mean that there are a lot of very well-fed, starving people in the world.

I think back to those receptions I was telling you about. There were a lot of smilers with empty eyes amongst those groups. I think if Jesus had walked in he would have said the same thing he did to those at the Feast. He would have looked to a crowd with glasses in their hands and said, “If any of you are thirsty…”

Sure, there would have been scoffers—for he always had a lot of those (because he was telling people that how they lived was wrong)—but there are probably some who would have “gotten it,” like I think some did back then, too. They would know the emptiness that I saw in their eyes, the dry heart, the parched soul, and they would have understood the message Jesus was saying.

I think about thirst. All the ways I feel I still thirst, and I am brought back to reality, as I look around this kitchen of mine, full of material blessings untold. And all I can think is: This material world does not satisfy. Some of you might have full glasses and empty souls. You might be one of the well-fed starving ones, for don’t ever be deceived that all of the world’s hungry are without food.

However, (don’t you love that there is always an HOWEVER??!?!), the invitation is the same today as it was 2,000 years ago. “If any of you are thirsty, let him come to me and drink…” Jesus says. “Streams of living water will flow…”

Drink deeply tonight, Wolfies, from the only One who can quench.